The Effective Manager

Notes on the book “The Effective Manager”

Chapter 1

  • Mission first, people always
  • Try to find out exactly what your responsibilities are
  • Two main objectives
    • Get results
    • Retain people (better than others)
  • Important to have relationships which help you understand the two objectives
    • What metrics am I going to be judged on
    • What are the average retention rates
  • I wonder how this introduction fits with e.g. Goodhart’s law, Campbell’s law
    • What about helping to define the right metrics (perhaps at a large company this isn’t isn’t your responsibility, but at a small company or start-up it could be)

Chapter 2

  • An MBA probably won’t teach you much about how to manage people
  • This book claims management is the same in a small or large company – I remain to be convinced
  • Four PC explaining 75% of variance in results and retention are
    1. Get to know your people
    2. Communicate about performance
    3. Ask for more
    4. Push work down
  • Get to know your people
    • Their strengths and weaknesses
    • Often managers engage in typical mind fallacy: treat people as they would like to be treated, ignoring individual variation
    • People are what deliver results, not systems or processes
    • Acid test: do you know the names of their kids (might have to come up with something different if you’re managing young people)
    • The point is not to become friends with your directs
    • Not like: blah-blah-blah-I’m-getting-to-the-real-reason-I’m-here-to-talk-to-you-in-a-second-blah-blah-blah (this seems like an easy mistake to make!)
    • Take into account that there is a power differential
    • You have to talk to them frequently about things that are important to them
    • The single most important thing you can do as a manager
  • Communicate about performance
    • To get better, you need feedback
    • NFL: every single second of every single play (those who fight for every second with their coach are headed to the hall of fame, so they claim)
      • Thinking about my own work: every single line of code, every single modelling choice, all aspects of a written document, presentation or talk
    • Not only negative feedback!
  • Asking for more performance
    • Managers are supposed to create stress for their directs
      • Distress and eustress
      • Always better to grow output by increasing capacity of current staff than bringing on new staff
  • Push work down
    • Time of directs costs less than time of managers
  • How does this change in a remote work environment?
    • It doesn’t, but it does become a lot more difficult

Chapter 3

  • What you do should be teachable
    • This is something I’ve been thinking about more broadly: creating resources
  • Management is not a personality thing
    • Every effective person needs to be growing their skills and influencing more people [in the company]
Critical behaviour Tool
Get to know your people One-on-ones
Communicate about performance Feedback
Ask for more Coaching
Push down work Delegation

Chapter 4

  • Know your people
  • How O3s with each of your directs
    • Weekly
    • 30 minutes
    • Directs issues are primary
  • Scheduled
    • Tells the direct that they matter
    • Gives them time to prepare
    • Fine to schedule then move the O3
  • Weekly
    • People usually work on a weekly basis
  • 30 minutes
    • Sweet spot
    • Better to have a jam-packed meeting than relaxed
  • Just do O3s with directs, not with skips (people who report to your directs)
    • Strong relationships with directs, then they have strong relationships with their directs
  • Take notes
    • Makes you seem more engaged
    • O3 should feel like a business meeting, rather than a personal meeting
    • Use physical or online note-taking format?
      • Just talks about physical
    • Distinctive way to capture deliverables
    • What do HR or legal need?
  • It should be in an office, but it could be in a semi-public space

Chapter 6

  • Pushback against O3s
    1. Micromanaging
    2. Don’t have time
    3. We talk all the time
  • Micromanaging
    • Directs who don’t want to be managed are a liability
    • Asking for one meeting a week is not micromanaging (obviously)
  • Don’t have time
    • You can announced that O3s won’t start for some number of weeks e.g. 3
    • If someone is busy O3s are even more important to make sure priorities are right
    • 30 minutes a week is r 100 * 30 / (8 * 60 * 5)% of the working week
    • Does anyone seriously have this objection?
    • Recommend avoiding using “role power” as much as you can
      • Role power
      • Relationship power
      • Expertise power
  • We talk all the time
    • Have an agenda
      • Directs go first
      • Start with the same first question
        • How’s it going?
        • How are you?
        • How are things?
        • Your agenda?
      • How to get directs to make the most of the O3? Have an agenda etc.
      • 15, 15 agenda
        • Directs usually talk for longer
      • Don’t be an agenda fascist
      • Uncommunicative directs are more challenging than verbose directs
      • Effectiveness of hand-written vs typed notes
        • What about a Google doc? Research on this? TODO: find examples of O3 templates online

Chapter 7

  • Negative performance communications are hard for many reasons, but these reasons are not your fault
  • When the typical manager gives feedback, they focus on what happened in the past
  • No one intends to make mistakes, so of course people have good reasons they did what they did
  • Challenge someone who fears you more than they trust you and of course you’ll get pushback
  • Purpose of performance communications is to encourage effective future behaviour
  • The model
    1. Ask
    2. Describe the behaviour
    3. Describe the impact of the behaviour
    4. Encourage effective future behaviour
  • Ask
    • Is now a good time to share some feedback?
    • Also, always ask to give feedback, not only when it’s negative
    • Environment with no feedback: “wicked” learning environment
  • Describe the behaviour
    • The behaviour, not the underlying roots of the behaviour
    • Behaviour is words, facial expressions, body language, work product (quality, quantity, accuracy, timeliness, documentation)